What On Earth Happened To GH’s Josslyn Jacks?

Once upon a time, Josslyn Jacks was a classic young soap teen heroine you could root for but those days seem to be gone as General Hospital has turned her into a heartless shrill shrew who rarely thinks of anyone but her own self.

The Total Transformation Of Josslyn Jacks

It was only a little over a year ago when our hearts broke for Josslyn as her first sexual experience was exploited in a horrific way that could make many young people shy away from sex. Eden McCoy’s performance illustrating Joss’s humiliation and pain from having her first time with Cameron (William Lipton) blasted out onto the Internet thanks to Esme’s (Avery Kristen Pohl) devious doings brought us to tears.

As both Joss and Cam tentatively navigated their relationship afterward, GH gave us a realistic story that came from character and not plot. We’d watched them both grow up before our eyes, with McCoy joining the soap in 2015 when she was only 11 years old. We thought we knew both characters, but perhaps we didn’t know Josslyn.

We expected there to be troubled waters between the young lovers and wondered if their relationship was damaged for good. When Joss met Dex (Evan Hofer), and her attraction toward him became apparent, we knew it was almost over for Joss and Cam, but we never expected things to end the way they did. Sure, it was normal to see Josslyn torn between the boy she’d known her whole life and this new exciting man in town, but meeting Dex seems to have turned Joss into a whole new person — and this new person is not very nice at all.

General Hospital: A Slow And Gradual Change For Josslyn Jacks

Josslyn has always had a bit (or more than just a bit) of her mother in her, following in Carly’s (Laura Wright) take-no-prisoners footsteps, and there was nothing wrong with that. She was a young woman who knew how to take charge and stick up for herself, but she didn’t have the complete sense of entitlement she exhibits now.

While it often rubbed us the wrong way when Josslyn would speak for Trina (Tabyan Ali), we gave it a pass because of how loyal she always was to Trina, refusing to believe for a second that her BFF could have made that sex video no matter what the evidence said. But, once Trina’s trial was over, and Joss became obsessed with all things Dex, everything began to change. By the time 2023 began, we didn’t know who Joss was anymore.

Josslyn Jacks Is Unrecognizable on General Hospital

The year began with Josslyn being attacked by the Hook on the docks as she was ready to board The Haunted Star. Britt Westbourne (Kelly Thiebaud) saved her, and Dex seemed to save Britt with his gun. Rather than stay with Britt until the police arrived, Joss and Dex ran off because they were afraid the cops would wonder why Dex had a gun as if that is the PCPD’s main concern in a mobster town with a serial killer on the loose.

Apparently, the adrenaline after the attack made both Joss and Dex amorous because they went right back to his apartment and slept together — while she was still officially Cam’s girlfriend. Only after having sex with someone else did Josslyn realize she might want to break up with Cam, so she ran straight to Kelly’s and broke a young man’s heart as a New Year’s gift, but she didn’t tell him why. She just said they had grown apart — and they had, which was okay, but it was far from the complete truth.

The next morning when Joss learned Britt died as a result of a knick from the Hook’s poison weapon, she wept for a hot minute, realizing that Britt lost her life saving her, but that was it. She barely showed another moment of remorse, lied to the cops about what happened, told nobody but Carly who Britt had saved, and callously refused to show up at Britt’s memorial, lest it would make her sad.

What she did to Cameron was even worse. She never told him about Dex. He just had to find them in her dorm room together. That’s when Joss threatened the boy she once came to love and told him there would be trouble if he breathed a word of her little dorm room romance to anyone. Joss was unrecognizable to us and unrecognizable to poor Cam.

Five months later, we are left with a young woman so obsessed with her new boyfriend that she doesn’t care who she hurts. In fact, she even convinced herself she was in a dangerous forbidden romance for no real reason whatsoever. Sonny was never going to kill just because they were dating cause Sonny couldn’t care less about her love life.

Like her brother, she will never forgive Sonny for no longer being in love with Carly. She is constantly rude for no reason to anyone she deems beneath her. She weeps about eternally-dying Willow (Katelyn MacMullen) but will chew out Michael (Chad Duell) for his decisions that might hurt Dex while his wife is in an isolation room with cancer.

Josslyn is a genuinely horrible person now. On the surface, she puts on airs of love and compassion but don’t get in the way of her sex life with Dex. That’s when the claws come out, and her true colors show. And those claws and true colors are bound to get the people she claims to love in more trouble than her young mind can imagine.

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